


The Gentle Bird Feels No Captivity Within Her Cage

by akathecentimetre



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Gen, and a tiny bit of history, meditation/rumination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9427232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: She got mustard on her chin, felt it drip; Graves had noticed, and nearly laughed, and drank his milkshake with all the fastidious pleasure of a man who didn’t want to go home quite yet.A very small set of speculations on Tina and Graves.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AgarthanGuide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/gifts).



> This is my first foray into the fandom. I hope it suits!

She’s not supposed to be here.

She never is, really. Tina’s never meant to be what and where she is. Too tall, she’d been told, and so she’d learned to slouch and duck, finding chairs which sunk low behind desks and taking comfort in teetering stacks of memos which muttered their displeasure when she hid behind them. Too curious, she’d been told, and so she’d learned to speak out of the corners of her mouth and around questions, wearing soft greys in backgrounds so wizards and no-majs alike didn’t see her against the suits and the concrete.

She hadn’t intended to draw any attention to herself in her first interview with the Director of Magical Security. Keep her head down, read the papers on his desk upside down, make sure to follow up in text - easy, persistent, silent text which didn’t require speech - those had been the extent of her ambitions.

Graves didn’t let her hide, which was - well, confusing. He had put his hand over the memos she’d been scanning, tapped a finger once or twice until she’d dared to look straight at him, and then looked at her with eyebrows raised, a professional not-quite-intrigued frankness in his eyes.

“So, you’re a watcher, huh?” he’d asked. “Tina.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’d nodded, self-satisfied, and moved his hand. “These reports are on a recent sighting of a Grindelwald lieutenant in Newport. Want to have a look?”

She hadn’t felt grateful - not quite. Whatever she did feel wasn’t that easy to define.

They’d found that wizard in Newport together, and, leaving him trussed-up and glaring in the boot of an enchanted car, eaten at a dockside diner. She got mustard on her chin, felt it drip; Graves had noticed, and nearly laughed, and drank his milkshake with all the fastidious pleasure of a man who didn’t want to go home quite yet. 

That was in 1925.

*

1926\. She’s gotten tired of opening her morning papers - the no-maj ones discarded by Mrs. Esposito, the magical ones thrust grumpily into her hands for half a dragot as she enters the Ministry - and finding little more than further reports of strange happenings and disappearances. She still prefers these banal articles, though, to the full dossiers of the truth waiting for her in the Department of Investigations, and the way Graves looks at them all, pacing, like he thinks there is some iota of human competence lacking somewhere that’s ruining everything. 

She thinks he looks tired. 

They’re all tired. Him more so, though, and he goes down for several days with something they all assume must be the flu. It’s going around. It’s a bad spring, a bad year for it. They still remember 1918, how not even magic had stopped it - and so Graves stays home and even the messages he sends in become short and abrupt, unlike himself. 

Tina goes to his house, once, in those couple of weeks, to a tidy little brownstone in Brooklyn Heights; she waits outside with a tub of her mother’s chicken noodle soup (well, she always says it’s her mother’s recipe - it’s really from the corner deli which had been her mother’s favorite, which, in New York, means practically the same thing), but no one answers the door.

She’s out looking for a mission when she finds the Second Salemers.

She’s sitting in his office, alone, when he arrives back, and has been there for two hours. Sometimes she feels cold, her insides turned into a sludgy, slow-moving poison of a potion; other times she feels like she’d do it again, damn, so many times, and her knuckles smart and itch for that awful woman’s face - 

She starts when the door opens, and when she screws up the courage to glance at him he’s strangely still in the door, half-shadowed, and very still.

“Tina,” he sighs, eventually, and she nearly starts again at the resumption of him, the confirmation of her fate. 

The tight, pained look doesn’t suit him. If she weren’t so upset that she couldn’t speak, she’d wonder why on earth he reaches across his desk and quietly breaks the news of her dismissal with his palm on top of her hand, as though she matters.

She does, she knows - she _did_  - but not like this.

She sees the same look on his face when he condemns her to death, and she wants to ask why ( _why_ ), but there’s no time.

*

It takes far longer than it should have for her to realize what on earth must have happened. In the chaos of the aftermath at City Hall, it takes until after Newt boards his ship for her to remember - to remember all of it. It takes her until her heart stops beating a little slantways in her chest - or at least until it subsides, just a little, and she feels the distant ache in her cheeks that reminds her to stop smiling - how she has been used, and deceived, and maybe even - 

No, but she won’t think of that now. She has work to do, and the quiet _Oh_  she says to herself before she apparates is full of quiet hope. 

The windows of the brownstone are dark, but inside, all is relatively as it ever must have been; there is nothing unusual in the arrangement of the furniture, in the half-bottle of milk on the kitchen table and the detritus of toast in the sink. Even Grindelwald, she supposes, would have needed to eat.

The basement door is small and low. She needs to light her way down, and then it is a cavernous, cold search, shivering at cobwebs and the evidence of rats, before she finds him. 

He knows. She can see it in his eyes, how he’s thought about it, how he’s wondered what more he could have done. She can see that he knows what has happened to him as she rubs warmth back into his blue-tinged hands and chafed wrists, how he knows what it was he was being used for every time someone leaned over him in the dark. It makes her want to hide again.

This time, when she feels his grip, she knows what it means. 

“Tina,” he rasps; he coughs, and sighs. “Always in the right place.”

And that’s enough, for now, to see a way forward.


End file.
